300 publishers take their fight against AI stealth bots to Congress

Executives from more than 300 news publishers are in Washington this week to lobby Congress for a bill that would ban AI “stealth bots”. The News/Media Alliance, a trade body for news and magazine publishers, organised the trip, Digiday reported on Tuesday.

Those making the trip include Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch, Hearst Magazines president Debi Chirichella and USA Today Co CEO Mike Reed. They are meeting senators, other members of Congress and their staff, Digiday’s Sara Guaglione wrote. On Wednesday, the alliance and America’s Newspapers are hosting a day of programming for publishers and lawmakers.

What the bill does

The Stealth Bot Prohibition Act (H.R. 9915) defines a stealth bot as one that accesses a site without first disclosing who it is and why. That includes failing to identify itself through an accurate user-agent string. It also covers failing to state what the content is for, such as search indexing, AI training or retrieval augmented generation.

The bill bans using stealth bots in ways likely to damage or burden a website. It also bans disguising a bot as a human user for use with generative AI.

The Federal Trade Commission could seek civil penalties of up to $53,000 per violation, adjusted each year for inflation. State attorneys general could also sue and seek damages for their residents. The rules would take effect 180 days after the bill becomes law.

Republican Reps Laurel Lee and Gus Bilirakis of Florida and Democrat Valerie Foushee of North Carolina introduced the bill in July. It sits with the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

“Today, website operators are too often left in the dark about who is accessing their systems and whether automated tools are collecting their content under false pretenses,” Lee said at the time.

The News/Media Alliance calls the bill an attempt to set one standard for the whole country. Missouri, Nebraska, Tennessee, Texas and Utah have proposed similar rules. New York passed its own Stealth Crawler Prohibition Act in June. The federal bill’s text says it does not affect rights or remedies under other federal or state laws.

Why publishers want it

Bots now make up more than 60% of internet traffic, according to Cloudflare data cited by Digiday. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince told The Verge that bots could reach 1,000 times human traffic.

TollBit counted more than 22 billion AI bot scrapes across the sites it analysed in the first half of 2026. On the publisher sites it tracks, the ratio of AI bot visits to human visits rose more than sixfold during 2025. By the fourth quarter, it stood at one in 31.

Danielle Coffey, the alliance’s CEO, said many of the executives have deep ties to the communities lawmakers represent.

“They’re all having the same experiences. Too many of these bots are coming on their sites. They can’t handle the traffic because they’re too small. If they can even handle it, if they’re larger, it’s stealing their content. It’s undermining the marketplace.”

Lynch backed the bill in July.

“AI companies are using disguised bots to scrape and steal original journalism with zero accountability. They use our work to train and operate their systems that then directly compete with us.”

On Wednesday, Lynch told Condé Nast staff he is leaving to become CEO of Mattel, Business Insider reported.

A means to an end

Coffey said she hopes the bill can be the “foundational cleanup” the market needs. If stealth crawlers must identify themselves, publishers can block them, she said. Then they can sign licensing deals with AI companies.

“The bill is a means to an end,” Coffey told Digiday.

David Buttle founded SPUR, a publisher AI coalition. He said the bill could raise the cost and legal risk of stealth scraping.

“Companies are currently paying for content but they’re paying intermediary scraping services to do this, rather than publishers.”

Reed told Digiday the bill is “a meaningful step toward greater transparency” on how publisher content is accessed and used.

“By coming together and speaking with one voice, we have a stronger opportunity to build support for legislation that will help create a healthier information ecosystem,” Chirichella said.

This year’s fly-in has roughly twice as many executives as last year’s and an extra day of programming, Coffey said. Conversations from last year’s meetings inspired the bill.

Other platforms are acting on scraping too. Reddit said this week it will shut down RSS feeds on 13 November, citing AI scraping. In July, Cloudflare gave AI crawlers a September deadline to pay publishers or face a block.